Tag: Dec

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Business News for Dec. 22, 2021

Credit history…Jens Buettner/DPA, by using Affiliated Press

Europe’s strength crunch demonstrates minor indicator of easing. All-natural gas marketplaces, the root of the challenge, continue to be on edge due to the fact provides are limited, and traders doubt no matter whether the continent has enough of the gasoline saved to last a cold winter season without having disruption.

The buildup of Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, by means of which Russian fuel flows to the West, also has extra to considerations about whether or not gas will operate out. Now, reduced volumes of gasoline from Russia, Europe’s major resource of imports of the gas, have helped raise rates in current months.

“There is a hazard of offer shortages that could erode financial advancement and cause community discord,” explained Henning Gloystein, a director for power and climate at Eurasia Group, a political possibility company, introducing that blackouts are feasible in a worst-case state of affairs. Mr. Gloystein claimed that must the scenario worsen, governments could possibly get factories minimize their fuel use to be certain that households have plenty of to preserve heat.

On Tuesday, gas on the TTF investing hub in the Netherlands hit a history amount of about $60 per million British thermal models on reviews that flows in a pipeline that can take Russian gas to Germany had been getting switched back toward the East. (European gas price ranges have doubled this month and are around 15 periods what gas is marketing for in the United States.)

Mr. Gloystein said this adjust of direction might replicate opportunistic investing activity instead than sinister maneuvering by Moscow, but the reality continues to be that normal gas marketplaces in Europe are ready to soar at the slightest provocation.

Tensions concerning Russia and the West in excess of Ukraine make it extremely unlikely that the large Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany will open whenever quickly and bring relief.

On a call with reporters on Tuesday, Karen Donfried, the assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, stated Washington deemed Nord Stream 2 “a Russian geopolitical venture that undermines the vitality protection and the national safety of a sizeable element of the Euro-Atlantic neighborhood.”

Ms. Donfried explained the United States was functioning carefully with the new German authorities to fortify Europe’s electrical power stability. Captivated by substantial selling prices, vitality firms are instructing ships carrying liquefied organic fuel to modify their places from Asia to Europe, but even that switching may well not be plenty of to change Russian fuel or appreciably simplicity the crunch.

“The industry knows there is more L.N.G. coming,” claimed Laura Web page, an analyst at Kpler, a investigation business. “But it does not feel to be having any impact on sentiment.”

Mainly because fuel is a essential gas for making electrical power, electric powered electricity costs also are soaring throughout Europe. In Britain, for occasion, continual ability was buying and selling on Tuesday for about 340 lbs ., about $450, for each megawatt-hour, a wholesale metric, on the Epex Spot exchange. That is about 3 moments the normal rate of electrical power around the 12 months.

The high gasoline costs of modern months will sooner or later lead to rises in strength fees for households in Britain and other nations around the world. Martin Youthful, an analyst at Investec, a securities company, forecast in a latest be aware to customers that British consumers, who have been secured by selling price ceilings, could see their electrical power expenditures increase more than 50 per cent when adjustments are introduced early future 12 months.

In new days, the closure of a few French nuclear plants to test for faults has additional stoked the energy marketplace.

“It’s turning out to be the new standard for this winter,” Mark Devine, a trader at Sembcorp, an electrical power organization, explained of the elevated charges.

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Business News for Dec. 17, 2021

On Thursday, prosecutors and defense lawyers laid out their closing arguments in the fraud trial of the founder of Theranos, the failed blood testing start-up. In what was effectively their last shot at convincing jurors, each side framed their arguments around the question of whether Ms. Holmes, 37, had deliberately chosen to lie, mislead and dissemble about her start-up.

“She chose fraud over business failure,” Jeff Schenk, an assistant U.S. attorney and one of the lead prosecutors, said of Ms. Holmes in his closing address to the jury.

Kevin Downey, a lawyer for Ms. Holmes, argued that she believed her own claims and had never meant to deceive. “If someone is acting in good faith, you have no reason to find them guilty,” he said.

The closing arguments capped 15 weeks of a trial that has stood out in the world of white-collar crime. Ms. Holmes’s case is being closely watched as a referendum on the worst excesses of Silicon Valley’s start-up culture, which prizes change-the-world claims and fast growth. The verdict could influence whether prosecutors pursue similar white-collar cases at a time when tech start-ups are swimming in funding and hype.

But proving intent is the most difficult part of prosecuting a white-collar criminal trial, said James Melendres, a former federal prosecutor.

“It goes to what was happening inside someone’s mind, which is extremely hard to prove definitively,” he said.

The jury of eight men and four women will begin to deliberate Ms. Holmes’s fate once the defense concludes its closing arguments, most likely on Friday. Ms. Holmes, who has pleaded not guilty to nine counts of wire fraud and two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted.

Before Theranos imploded, Ms. Holmes stood out as the rare successful female founder in the male-dominated tech industry. She founded Theranos in 2003, dropped out of Stanford University in 2004 to work on the start-up and raised nearly $1 billion from investors for the company’s supposedly revolutionary blood testing technology. Its promise: Theranos’s tests could detect a range of health conditions with just a few drops of blood.

But a Wall Street Journal investigation in 2015 revealed that Theranos’s technology did not work and that Ms. Holmes appeared to have been courting investors and commercial partners with misleading claims. The company collapsed in 2018 after voiding millions of its blood tests.

That same year, Ms. Holmes was indicted on fraud charges. Her trial began on Sept. 8 after numerous delays.

Prosecutors called 29 witnesses, outlining six main areas of Ms. Holmes’s alleged deception, including lies about the abilities of Theranos’s technology, its work with the military and its business performance.

Former Theranos employees testified that the start-up’s technology regularly failed quality-control tests, returned inaccurate results and could perform only a dozen tests, rather than the hundreds that Ms. Holmes claimed. Doctors and patients spoke about how they had made medical decisions based on Theranos tests that turned out to be wrong.

Prosecutors also showed a set of Theranos validation reports that bore the logos of pharmaceutical companies that had neither prepared nor signed off on the conclusions therein. They showed letters to investors in which Ms. Holmes falsely claimed Theranos had military contracts and emails from employees that said the company hid device failures and removed abnormal blood test results.

In testimony, investors and pharmaceutical executives said that Ms. Holmes’s claims had led them to invest millions of dollars in Theranos or sign contracts with her company.

“The government spent a lot of time putting in evidence about not just one particular alleged misrepresentation, but several,” Mr. Melendres said. “If you line up three, four, five, a half-dozen misstatements, it gets harder for the jury to pull together on anything other than that there was an intentional scheme.”

The defense called only three witnesses and relied on Ms. Holmes to carry their case. Last month, she took the stand to paint herself as a well-meaning entrepreneur who was naïve and relied too much on those around her. She said she had been emotionally and physically abused by Ramesh Balwani, Theranos’s former chief operating officer and her former boyfriend.

Ms. Holmes’s voice shook and her eyes teared up as she recounted how Mr. Balwani dictated nearly every aspect of her life and even forced sex on her, implying that she was less in control of her actions than prosecutors had made out. She cried on the stand for a second time when prosecutors, to rebut her characterization that the relationship was abusive, asked her to read loving text messages between her and Mr. Balwani.

Mr. Balwani, who faces identical fraud charges to Ms. Holmes and faces trial next year, has denied the allegations.

On Thursday, Mr. Schenk dismissed Ms. Holmes’s accusations of abuse as irrelevant to the fraud charges.

“The case is about false statements made to investors and false statements made to patients,” Mr. Schenk said, noting that a guilty verdict did not mean the jury disbelieved her abuse allegations and vice versa. “You do not need to decide whether that abuse happened.”

Mr. Schenk instead focused on tying together weeks of testimony. He walked through the witnesses one by one and outlined each element of the 11 counts against Ms. Holmes. At times, he instructed jurors to write down exhibit numbers to refer back to during deliberations.

Over and over, Mr. Schenk highlighted claims Ms. Holmes herself had made, pointing to inaccurate quotes she gave to journalists and playing a recording of her exaggerating Theranos’s military ties to investors.

He displayed emails to Ms. Holmes, in which she was informed of problems with the accuracy of Theranos’s technology, and a timeline showing that she forged ahead with the start-up’s commercial introduction nonetheless.

“She was involved; she’s responsible; she knows,” Mr. Schenk said.

The defense began its closing argument by positing that the government did not tell the full story of Theranos’s relationship with pharmaceutical companies. Mr. Downey said Theranos had some contracts with pharmaceutical companies and pointed out instances in which Ms. Holmes offered to connect investors with the drugmakers, arguing that she did not intend to deceive investors about those relationships.

He lingered on the positive feedback that Ms. Holmes received about Theranos’s tests to show she believed her claims about the technology. He also pointed to her willingness to allow the Food and Drug Administration and other institutions to evaluate Theranos’s technology as signs that she was not trying to hide how the technology worked.

Mr. Downey also delved into details like Ms. Holmes’s understanding of the word “accuracy” to demonstrate that others had misunderstood her, not that she had misled them.

Mr. Downey concluded Thursday’s session by displaying a list of Theranos’s star-studded board of directors, which included a former secretary of state, George Shultz, and a former senator, Sam Nunn, a Democrat from Georgia.

The slide was titled: “Was this group all fooled?”

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Business News for Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2021

By Ana Swanson and Jeanna Smialek

Jerome H. Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, suggested on Wednesday that the economy could achieve the central bank’s full-employment goal by next year, a development that could presage raising interest rates from their rock-bottom levels.

Mr. Powell emphasized that a broad range of economic indicators, including unemployment, job openings, wages and other metrics, suggest the labor market is healing quickly, creating more room for the central bank to remove its economic support.

“In my view, we are making rapid progress toward maximum employment,” Mr. Powell said.

Mr. Powell said that the unemployment rate, which was 4.2 percent in November, has been dropping quickly. He said that the labor force participation rate had been “disappointing,” even as vaccinations increased and schools reopened, and that it now seemed likely that a return to a higher participation rate would take some time.

“We’re not going back to the same economy we had in February of 2020,” Mr. Powell said. “The post-pandemic labor market and the economy in general will be different, and the maximum level of employment that’s consistent with price stability evolves over time.”

Inflation is far outstripping the Fed’s target, climbing by 6.8 percent in the year through November, the fastest pace in nearly 40 years. But it has been less clear whether the Fed has accomplished its other economic goal — full employment — meaning that Americans who want to work are able to find jobs.

The unemployment rate is still above the 3.5 percent that prevailed before the pandemic’s onset, but it has been falling quickly. Fresh economic projections released by the Fed on Wednesday show officials expect the jobless rate to fall to 3.5 percent again by the end of next year.

About 4 million jobs are still missing compared with before the pandemic, complicating the Fed’s job when it comes to assessing whether it has met its dual goals of keeping prices stable and the job market strong.

The question has been whether and when missing workers will come back and if policymakers feel the need to leave interest rates low until they do. The virus has complicated that outlook. While many workers have retired, some are reluctant or unable to return for health, child care or other reasons.

Mr. Powell said it would likely take time, and the retreat of the pandemic, for those people to come back into the work force, and that inflation would likely need to remain in check in the meantime to allow for a long period of economic growth.

“One of the two big threats to getting back to maximum employment is actually high inflation,” he said. “Because to get back to where we were, the evidence grows that it’s going to take some time.”

Fed officials have said that they wanted to achieve inflation sustainably above 2 percent — which has been more than accomplished, several have signaled — and full employment before raising interest rates. The economic projections released by the Fed on Wednesday suggested that officials expected to make three interest rate increases next year.

Mr. Powell previously said that the Fed’s two goals have come into tension this year. He has also signaled that the central bank will not allow inflation to rocket out of control.

“We have to balance those two goals when they are in tension as they are right now,” Mr. Powell said in testimony on Dec. 1. “But I assure you we will use our tools to make sure that this high inflation that we are experiencing does not become entrenched.”

In remarks Wednesday, Mr. Powell said that the Fed did have a framework it could use to make decisions about its interest rate when its dual goals of price stability and employment come into conflict. But due to the improvement in the labor market, the Fed would not necessarily have to use it.

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Business News for Dec. 15, 2021

Credit…Alex Welsh for The New York Times

Janice Min, a media executive in Los Angeles, is joining forces with Richard Rushfield, a show-business columnist, to start a new media business that will be spun off from his popular subscription newsletter, The Ankler.

Ms. Min, who transformed The Hollywood Reporter from a struggling trade publication into a successful, large-format glossy, will become the co-owner, chief executive and editor in chief of the newly formed Ankler Media. Mr. Rushfield, the founder of The Ankler, which bills itself as “the newsletter Hollywood loves to hate and hates to love,” will be the company’s editorial director and chief columnist.

“One of the things that really sold me on doing this with Richard is he gave me visibility into the subscriber list, and it’s insane,” Ms. Min said in an interview. “It’s a Who’s Who of power in the entertainment community, and from that base I feel like there is so much potential to exercise that level of influence.”

Mr. Rushfield wrote for BuzzFeed, The Los Angeles Times and Gawker before going solo with a newsletter in 2017, a move he made because he felt there was room for coverage that was “sharper-elbowed, more irreverent and more fun than what was out there,” he said.

The Ankler started as something he wrote to amuse his friends. Eventually, he moved it to the digital newsletter platform Substack, and he now charges $10 a month for a subscription. According to Substack’s public leaderboard, which ranks newsletters by revenue, it is in the platform’s top three business publications.

“So have you met Americans lately or the entertainment consumers of the world?” he wrote in Monday’s edition, on the disappointing box-office results for Steven Spielberg’s big-budget adaptation of “West Side Story.”

“It may shock you to learn that they aren’t versed in the history of midcentury American musical theater,” he continued. “The mass culture as it stands can barely remember who Katy Perry was and won’t take kindly to anyone pointing out to them that entertainment existed in a time before that.”

Ms. Min said she first saw The Ankler’s potential for expansion after reading a post by Mr. Rushfield on the lack of diversity in the executive ranks at film studios, which included screenshots of “About Us” pages that showed mostly white leadership teams.

Over the last 18 months, Ms. Min and Mr. Rushfield discussed ways to expand the newsletter, including with other media companies, before deciding to stick with Substack. They said they planned to keep The Ankler as the flagship and would introduce additional newsletters, as well as podcasts and events, starting in January.

They will also bring on new hires, with the first being Tatiana Siegel, the executive film editor of The Hollywood Reporter, who will join in January to report on the worlds of Hollywood and entertainment.

Ms. Min and Mr. Rushfield said the company would be part of a three-month program run by Y Combinator, a start-up incubator known for its early investments in Airbnb and Reddit. The program gives company founders seed money and business guidance.

A focus of Ankler Media’s coverage will be the clashes between the tech executives now making big decisions in Hollywood and the ones who have been around since moviegoers waited in line to buy tickets.

“That push-pull tension between the people who eat McCarthy Salads at the Polo Lounge with the Silicon Valley algorithm people — that’s a real tension that’s going to drive the next 10, 20, 30 years here,” Ms. Min said.

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Business News for Thursday, Dec. 9, 2021

Employees at a Buffalo-area Starbucks store have voted to form a union, making it the only one of the nearly 9,000 company-owned stores in the United States to be organized and notching an important symbolic victory for labor at a time when workers across the country are expressing frustration with wages and working conditions.

The result, announced on Thursday by the National Labor Relations Board, represents a major challenge to the labor model at the giant coffee retailer, which has argued that its workers enjoy some of the best wages and benefits in the retail and restaurant industry and don’t need a union.

The union was leading in an election at another store, but by a margin smaller than the number of ballots the union was seeking to disqualify through challenges. The challenges must be resolved by the labor agency’s regional director in the coming days or weeks before there is a result. Workers at a third store voted against unionizing, according to the board, though a union lawyer contended that some ballots had been delivered to the agency and not counted.

“Although it’s a small number of workers, the result has huge symbolic importance and symbols are important when it comes to union organizing,” John Logan, a labor studies professor at San Francisco State University, said in an email. “Workers who want to form a union in the United States are forced to take a considerable amount of risk, and it helps if they can see others who have taken that risk and it has paid off.”

The unionized employees, who are joining Workers United, an affiliate of the giant Service Employees International Union, received inquiries throughout the campaign from Starbucks workers across the country who said they were paying close attention and were interested in unionizing as well.

“I don’t think it will stop in Buffalo, whatsoever,” Alexis Rizzo, a worker at one of the stores and a leader in the organizing campaign, said at a news conference after the vote.

Workers cited frustration over understaffing and insufficient training when they filed for union elections at the stores in late August, problems that have dogged the company for years but which appeared to worsen during the pandemic. Such problems are not unique to Starbucks and have been problems for workers across the restaurant and retail industries for many years.

“We continue on as we did today, yesterday and the day before that,” Rossann Williams, Starbucks’s president of retail for North America, said in a letter to employees after the vote. “The vote outcomes will not change our shared purpose or how we will show up for each other.”

The election occurred through mail ballots that were due Wednesday. In November, workers at three more Buffalo-area stores filed the paperwork needed to hold union elections, but it was unclear when votes would take place for those outlets.

Starbucks responded to the union campaign with a sense of urgency. Throughout the fall, out-of-town managers and executives — even Ms. Williams — converged on stores in Buffalo, where they questioned employees about operational challenges and assisted in menial tasks like cleaning bathrooms.

In a video of a meeting in September viewed by The New York Times, a district manager from Arizona told co-workers that the company had asked her to go to Buffalo to help “save it” from unionization.

Several workers who support the union said they found the presence of these officials intimidating and, at times, surreal. They also complained that Starbucks had temporarily closed certain stores in the area, which they found disruptive, and said Starbucks had excessively added staff in at least one of the three stores that held elections. The workers said this had diluted support for unionization at the store.

“As of today we’ve done it in spite of everything that the company has thrown at us and we all know it has been an extensive anti-union campaign by Starbucks corporate,” Michelle Eisen, a barista at the Buffalo location that unionized who also helped lead the campaign, said at the news conference.

Former National Labor Relations Board officials have said that these actions by the company could be interpreted as undermining the “laboratory conditions” that are supposed to prevail during union elections and that they could serve as grounds for throwing out a result. Workers involved in the union campaign and a union lawyer indicated that they might challenge the result at the store where workers voted down the union.

A regional director of the labor board recently overturned a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Alabama on similar grounds.

Starbucks has said that it dispatched out-of-town officials and temporarily closed stores to help solve staffing and training problems and to remodel stores to make them more efficient. The company said that it added staff to deal with an increase in the number of workers calling in sick and that it had taken such steps across the country since the spring, when coronavirus infection rates dropped and stores became busier.

Ms. Williams, the North America president, said in an interview on Wednesday from Buffalo that she did not feel that the run-up to the vote had been especially contentious and that she had spent much of her time there this fall listening to employees (partners, in the company’s words) and addressing “the conditions that partners had pointed out.”

The key issue at the store whose vote was unresolved, near the Buffalo airport, was whether several workers who cast ballots were actually employed at the store. The union argues that they were employed at another store in the area and worked at the airport store for only a short period of time. The company said they were eligible to vote under the labor board’s rules.

The outcome could be important for determining the union’s leverage when it seeks to negotiate a contract. Under the law, an employer is obligated to bargain with a union in good faith, but there is no requirement that it actually agree to a contract, and the consequences of failing to bargain in good faith are limited.

“The incentives to resist bargaining are significant for the employer,” said Kate Andrias, a labor law expert at Columbia Law School. “If workers are able to win a good contract, it sets a precedent.”

Professor Andrias said that the ability to win a contract in such situations often hinged on the amount of economic pressure the union can exert, and that having a second unionized store could help in this regard.

Ms. Eisen, the worker at the store that unionized, said at the news conference that the workers would like to “offer the olive branch to the company and say, ‘Let’s put this behind us.’” She added: “Now is the time, let’s get to the bargaining table as quickly as possible.”

Starbucks has faced other union campaigns over the years, including one in New York City in the 2000s and one in 2019 in Philadelphia, where it fired two employees involved in organizing, a move that a labor board judge found unlawful. The company appealed the ruling and a decision is still pending.

Neither of those campaigns succeeded, but workers are unionized at Starbucks stores owned by other companies that operate them under licensing agreements. And workers at a company-owned store in Canada recently unionized.

A handful of the company’s early stores in Seattle had a union and were represented by the United Food and Commercial Workers in the 1980s. The union was decertified.

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Business News for Dec. 9, 2021

WASHINGTON — Lawmakers of both parties came out swinging in a hearing on Wednesday with Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, expressing deep skepticism and anger toward the company for not doing enough to protect young users.

In a hearing held by a Senate subcommittee on consumer protection, lawmakers grilled Mr. Mosseri on internal research leaked by a whistle-blower that showed Instagram had a toxic effect on some teenagers. They pressed him to commit to share data with researchers on algorithmic ranking systems and to support legislation for stronger privacy and security protections for children online.

Even Instagram’s announcements this week on new safety tools for children were too little and too late, they said.

“Facebook’s own researchers have been warning management, including yourself, Mr. Mosseri, for years,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut and chairman of the subcommittee. “Parents are asking, what is Congress doing to protect our kids and the resounding bipartisan message from this committee is that legislation is coming. We can’t rely on self-policing.”

The hearing is part of a growing effort in Washington to rein in the power of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. Antitrust regulators are seeking to break up Google and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, and lawmakers have introduced dozens of data privacy, speech and competition bills.

Calls for legislative changes have intensified in recent weeks, after a whistle-blower at Facebook leaked internal research that said Instagram led one out of three teenagers to feel worse about their body image and for as many as 16 percent of some teenagers in Britain to have thoughts of suicide. The documents obtained by the whistle-blower, Frances Haugen, often contradicted public statements made by Meta officials, who have long underplayed or rebutted criticism that Instagram harms the mental and emotional well-being of younger users.

“You better tell the truth,” Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat of Minnesota, told Mr. Mosseri. “You’re under oath.”

Mr. Mosseri, 38, was appearing before Congress for the first time. He is a longtime executive at Facebook and is considered a close lieutenant of the company’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. He joined the company in 2008 as a designer and gradually rose in the ranks to run the News Feed, a central feature of the Facebook app. In October 2018, he was named head of Instagram, weeks after the sudden resignations of the app’s founders, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger.

He told lawmakers that Instagram often had a positive role in the lives of teenagers, such as by helping them establish connections during difficult times. He tried to direct attention at rivals, noting that more teenagers use TikTok and YouTube. He also acknowledged the skepticism among members of Congress toward Meta.

“I recognize that many in this room have deep reservations about our company,” Mr. Mosseri said. “But I want to assure you that we do have the same goal. We all want teens to be safe online.”

On Tuesday, Instagram announced new safety features for children. Mr. Mosseri mentioned those changes in the hearing, which include tools like a “take a break” function that is meant to help limit time spent online. (TikTok has a similar function that appears when users are spending too much time on the app.)

But Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, the ranking Republican member of the subcommittee, said even the basic promises of privacy and security from the company had failed users.

This week, her staff set up an experimental account for a fictional 15-year-old and were surprised to find the profile automatically set to public exposure. Instagram says teenage accounts automatically default to the private setting.

Mr. Mosseri acknowledged the error and said Ms. Blackburn’s office exposed a flaw in Instagram’s controls that sets teenage accounts that were created on a web browser — and not on a mobile app — to public. “We will correct that,” Mr. Mosseri said.

Mr. Blumenthal’s office has received hundreds of calls and emails from parents about their negative experiences with Instagram, he has said. One parent recounted how her daughter’s interest in fitness on Instagram led the app to recommend accounts on extreme dieting, eating disorders and self-harm.

Mr. Blumenthal has homed in on the algorithms, which he called “800-pound gorillas in black boxes,” that push such recommendations.

Lawmakers, including Mr. Blumenthal and Ms. Blackburn, have proposed stronger data privacy rules aimed at protecting children and greater enforcement of age restrictions. They have also called for young users to be able to delete information online. Lawmakers have pursued similar legislation before, with little success. Though lawmakers often show bipartisan unity in the hearings, dozens of data privacy bills have been stymied by intense industry lobbying and partisan disagreement over how stringent laws should be.

Senator John Thune, a Republican of South Dakota, has introduced a bill that would force companies to reveal more about their algorithmic ranking system. He asked if Instagram would allow users to rank their content chronologically, instead of through opaque decisions based purely on engagement.

Mr. Mosseri said the company was working on the feature, which could be available next year.

Though Mr. Mosseri repeated his support for regulations, he demurred when asked about specific proposals. He said he hadn’t read a bill introduced by Mr. Blumenthal and other lawmakers that could hold Meta liable for hosting harmful content. He wouldn’t commit to give up completely on the idea of building a version of the Instagram app for users under the age of 13. And he didn’t directly answer questions as to whether victims should be able to sue Meta for hosting sex-trafficking content.

Child advocacy groups said Mr. Mosseri failed to provide any greater assurances that Instagram would prioritize child safety.

“Today’s hearing was just more of the same: evasions, empty promises, and too-little, too-late gestures aimed at forestalling congressional action instead of meaningfully addressing Instagram’s harmful business model and design choices,” said Josh Golin, executive director of Fairplay.

Leaders of the subcommittee said they would hold additional hearings, which may include more executives of Meta. Mr. Blumenthal said Mr. Mosseri’s vague commitment for “directional” support on laws “doesn’t cut it.”

“This industry has said it is in favor of government regulation but they have opposed specific measures with armies of lawyers and lobbyists and tons of money,” Mr. Blumenthal said.